Germany-based business software maker SAP has promised its shareholders that it will double its revenues by 2015 thanks to new cloud, mobile and big data ventures, and the firm is planning to meet that deadline.  It unveiled its new “Build and Sell” program this week, which opens up the SAP BusinessObjects product line-up for the company’s channel partners.  The ones participating in the initiative would in turn build and market their own apps based on components from SAP’s software, such as APIs, data models, and more.

“AP channel partners and volume resellers that sell the solutions can use the program to gather expertise in new industries, reuse content to deliver tailored customer solutions and develop partner-to-partner relationships to help drive their business into new markets.”

The small and midsize enterprise market is SAP’s focus with this new initiative, which has already managed to attract several partners.  According to the software maker, 10 partners have already developed solutions build on BusinesObjects code.  And LIFE, an Ecuador-based pharmaceutical company, is using an application developed by SAP partner Noux called Pharmaceutical Data Warehouse.

Opening up one of its core products to its ecosystem is a very interesting step, and has the potential of increasing the profitability of its partner base, which is one of the company’s main objectives.

Build and Sell is the first partner initiative at this scale for the company, though it follows several other smaller, yet perhaps equally significant ones. One example is when SAP made its Sybase products available to resellers worldwide.

Another company that’s also been growing and investing in its ecosystem is Cloudera, a leading Hadoop distributor for the enterprise. Its Cloudera Connect Partner Program is comparable with Build and Sell in terms of scale: the company is offering partners resources, case studies, developer tools,  a certification suite for Apache Hadoop and more.